Best Street Food in Fes Medina — Eating Your Way Down Talaa Kebira

Start at Bab Bou Jeloud, the blue gate, and walk down. The first thing to look for is maakouda, deep-fried potato cakes tucked into bread with harissa, and bissara, a thick fava-bean soup dusted with cumin and swimming in olive oil that is a cheap, filling breakfast or lunch. Sellers of snail soup (babbouche) ladle out steaming cups from bubbling cauldrons — the peppery broth is prized as a warming tonic, and the snails are pulled out with a pin.

Deeper in, the sweet stalls take over. Fes is famous for its honey-soaked pastries: chebakia (sesame flower-shaped fritters), sfenj (fresh doughnuts fried to order), and briouat stuffed with almond paste. Near the Chouara tanneries and the Seffarine metalworkers' square you will find grilled-meat stands and vendors selling khlii sandwiches. Fresh orange and, in season, sugarcane and pomegranate juice are pressed at carts throughout the medina.

The medina's food is best eaten by grazing — a maakouda here, a cup of bissara there, a handful of dates and a msemen further down. Follow the crowds of Fassi locals rather than the tour groups, keep small change for the stalls, and remember the medina is a maze; the food lanes broadly follow the two Talaa streets downhill from Bab Bou Jeloud toward the Qarawiyyin.